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China has scored a major diplomatic victory in Myanmar by helping the conclusion of a truce between the ruling military junta and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA) in the provinces bordering China. The MNDAA rebels took control of large areas around the border by driving out the junta troops last month. China was negotiating a deal as the mediator for the last two weeks and it was finally announced on Saturday.

LONDON: Donald Trump’s presidency is an opportunity to challenge Britain’s “special relationship” with Washington and the NATO war machine. Both Trump and his liberal opponents present his movement as one disrupting these old alliances. Trump derides allies for not pulling their weight and even talks of seizing their territory. Liberals on both sides of the Atlantic see this as a threat to the US-policed world order.

Voters list manipulation has become a serious issue in Delhi Vidhan Sabha election, more so after the publication of Parliamentary and Assembly Constituency wise number of electors as on January 17, 2025. Shrinkage of number of electorates in ‘one in five’ Vidhan Sabha constituencies compared to 2020, shows the shifting demography, which is likely to impact the poll outcome.

Corporate sector pitching for an increase in the working hours and paying less wages, disproportionate to the value of their labour, sends a terrifying message that character of the Indian economy is experiencing changes and has come full circle to acquire the silhouette of the capitalist industrial relation.

There’s a lesson for Prime Minister Narendra Modi in President Donald Trump’s inaugural address on the morning he took the oath to become the 47th President of the United States: Make sure, you keep the promises made to the electorate. President Trump himself did not wait, his slew of executive orders were prompt. Unlike Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is a laggard in keeping poll promises, if at all.

PARIS: French Prime Minister François Bayrou comfortably survived his first confidence vote on Thursday, a little over one month after the veteran centrist became France’s prime minister. The January 16 vote, called by the left-wing force La France Insoumise (LFI), came two days after Bayrou’s inaugural “general policy” statement to the National Assembly on Tuesday. In the end, however, the no-confidence motion won the support of only 131 MPs in the 577-seat lower house — two hundred votes less than the no-confidence vote that sunk the short-lived government of Bayrou’s predecessor, Michel Barnier.

NEW YORK: Until pretty recently, if you thought of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, you’d probably come up with a flesh-and-blood automaton whose mission to connect the world turned into the upending of political systems and poisoning of our information environment — not to mention that weird metaverse side project. Accusations that his platform helped get Donald Trump elected in 2016 led to a series of scandals that the company struggled to effectively respond to — at least until another billionaire rose to take his crown.

Indians are travelling abroad like never before. Last year, over 30 million Indians travelled abroad, mostly on leisure trips. The number is nearly 15 percent more than that in 2023. The total expenditure rose by 25 percent. Rich and upper middle-class Indians are also increasingly sending their children for foreign studies. Over 1.33 million Indian students are currently pursuing education abroad. Some Indians are going for groovy overseas sites for weddings. Inviting international celebrities to attend marriage ceremonies in India has become trendy. Lavish foreign exchange expenditure is a non-issue for this class of Indians. The Reserve Bank’s Liberalised Remittance Scheme allows Indian residents to send up to $250,000 abroad per year without prior RBI approval. Rapid fall of Indian Rupee (INR) vis-à-vis other popular foreign currencies such as US$, Euro, Singapore$, British Pound, Swiss Franc, and Japanese Yen in recent years had little impact on foreign spending by the fund flush Indian upper class.

True to their word, after the Centre’s invite for talk, 121 farmers ended their fast-unto-death hunger strike at Khanauri border of Punjab and Haryana on November 19, while their leader Jagjit Sigh Dallewal who has been on fast-unto-death hunger strike since November 26, 2024, has agreed to take treatment to pave the way for fruitful talk. An immediate crisis has thus been averted, but the farmers’ predicaments are far from over. February 14 is decided for talk, and the Centre and the Farmers’ unions are getting ready for tough negotiations.

Irrefutably Nishant Kumar is the heir apparent of Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar, but the real intent of Nitish behind introducing him in the politics has two distinct motives; first it is being viewed as a part of his strategy to counter Tejashvi, who has been consistently targeting him and humiliating him for his frequent somersaults and blocking the move of his patriarch father Lalu Yadav to accept Nitish once again as the leader of the INDIA bloc, and secondly, to project him as a youth leader who imbibes the aspirations of the crores of backwards, Dalits and mahadalits youths.